Why receipt AI will change accounting and bookkeeping
What can analyzing receipts and purchases can do show you the health of your business and supply chain?
Businesses have a lot of expenses every day. If businesses do not have real time visibility and analytics into costs and their suppliers, products could easily be sold at a loss. Analyzing receipts is critical to accurately categorize your expenses.
What if accounting, bookkeeping, and expense management could be mostly automated starting from receipts?
The way in which a receipt scanner vs AI differs, is rather than simply saving an image of your receipt, AI, computer vision, OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology intelligently read, recognize, extract, and reconcile the information.
Match receipts to card spend, to invoices, to purchase orders, and finally back to bank transactions and accounting ledgers.
Drill down to even individual line items, products, SKUs, fees, and taxes.
Well over 8 million receipts per month are scanned and processed by Photon Commerce’s intelligent software across over 1200 businesses and 600,000 vendors.
The Photon Commerce team knows what an epic task it can be to filter through a bunch of receipts and translate it into a tidy expense report. That is why they have taken it on board and made it their mission to streamline expense processing and take away the associated pain. The tool they have created enables receipt management in real time, with ease.
Using its own home grown computer vision, OCR, and Natural Language Processing technology, Photon Commerce is an efficient and automatic receipt scanning and extraction technology. Once your receipts have been scanned, opens up to a wealth of useful functions.
An overview of how Photon Commerce works:
· Snap a photo of the receipt
· Upload your photo to Photon Commerce using an API
· The AI and OCR technology will do its thing, and extract all the important bits – merchant, date, amount and currency
· Add in any additional metadata or notes you require
· Send the receipt off for approval, from the comfort of your smartphone
· The transactions are exported to your accounting system
The Photon Commerce API has the ability to detect many different types of errors, mistakes, exceptions, inconsistencies, omissions, and potential fraud, such as, duplicate documents, manipulated images and outright fake receipts.
It can be such a handy tool in analysis – from geographical price comparisons and market basket analysis. It even has the ability to scan for loyalty programs and cashback opportunities.
Photon Commerce has the functionality to provide you with valuable collated data based on values such as;
· Product data and classification
· Merchant data
· Purchasing location
· Pricing data
Some highlights of Photon Commerce are;
· Photon Commerce achieves 90-95% accuracy
· It is available in over 10 languages
· It has the capacity to process huge volumes of transactions
What are the benefits of these applications?
Other than saving you from the sense of impending doom, brought about by having a shoebox full of miscellaneous receipts that desperately need attention, there are a few other benefits of getting on the receipt scanning bandwagon. They include;
· It doesn’t take up any space and leaves you free from clutter
· You can spend your time on more valuable tasks
· Expedited data processing
· Expense reporting can be done automatically
· Searchability of transactions
· Accessible storage well into the future
· Rest easy, knowing your data is safe and secure
· Receipts can never be misplaced or end up going through the laundry cycle
· Digitized versions of receipts are legal documents, and recognized by the courts
· Accuracy and efficiency
· Currency conversion happens automatically, without the headache
· Receipts are exportable to your accounting software
· Transaction matching happens for you, to make life easier
· 24/7 accessibility and functionality from any location
· Securely and easily share data
· Metadata can be added to receipts
